Three New Exhibitions open at newly-refurbished Museum of Art

New Mexico Museum of Art

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 16, 2017

MEDIA CONTACT

(Santa Fe, NM) -- The New Mexico Museum of Art launches its Centennial year celebration Saturday, November 25, after being closed more than two months for a significant renovation. Three new exhibitions opened as New Mexico’s first Museum sets out on its second century.

Horizons: People and Place in New Mexican Art

November 25, 2017 – November 25, 2018

Drawn primarily from the New Mexico Museum of Art’s extensive collection, Horizons shows the wide and dynamic range of styles, personalities, cultures, and forms that visual creative expression took in the 20th century, and combines to show the heart of a land that became a major center for artistic expression in a remarkable period of human history.

Experience for yourself some the greatest artists who lived and worked in New Mexico in the last century: Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Bert Greer Phillips, James Stovall Morris, Victor Higgins, Awa Tsireh, Maria Martinez, Fritz Scholder, Alfred Morang, Cady Wells, Andrew Dasburg, and Gustave Baumann, among many others.

With a contemporary focus since the beginning, the New Mexico Museum of Art has been a progressive advocate for the arts over the past hundred years. Focusing on the museum’s historic collection, Horizons honors our institution’s history as a locus for creativity. This exhibition, including paintings, drawings, prints, and furniture, highlights the impact of the museum in creating an artistic identity for the state.

Major themes will include the founding of the museum, Native arts, a spotlight on Gustave Baumann, 20th century art and community, furniture design in New Mexico, and a selection of work voted on by visitors.

Shifting Light: Photographic Perspectives

November 25, 2017 – October 7, 2018

Shifting Light offers a twenty-first century perspective on the museum’s long-term engagement with the popular medium of photography. Organized into the broad categories of place, identity, and creativity, the exhibition juxtaposes photographs in ways that amplify their meanings and suggest new narratives. Ansel Adams’ famous 1940 photograph Moonrise, Hernandez is paired with a 1975 landscape by Thomas Barrow from his series Cancellations, while Alfred Stieglitz’s 1918 portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe keeps company with images by Anne Noggle and Joyce Neimanas.

Using portraits and oral histories, the show introduces some of the personalities in New Mexico’s twentieth-century photography scene, such as artist Laura Gilpin and curator Beaumont Newhall. Collectors, another integral part of the photography community, are represented by a changing selection of promised gifts that are pledged as future additions to the museum’s collection. Visitors are invited to write or draw their own memories, favorite photographs, and other responses to the show. Vintage exhibition announcements, brochures, and publications tell a complementary story of photography’s growing prominence at the museum from the mid-1920s to the present.

The exhibition closes with work that challenges perceptions about photography and suggests future directions, including its changing role in museums.

Contact: Local to Global

November 25, 2017 – April 28, 2018

Contact: Local to Global, like the other centennial exhibitions, highlights the engagement of artists with New Mexico, the Museum of Art with artists and collectors, and New Mexico’s engagement with the national and international arts community. Additionally, the exhibition looks beyond those very literal intersections and implicates larger ideas about contact such as our engagement with the land and environment, our communities’ alignment with one another, and more broadly the implications of contact such as the discovery of the New World, and space exploration.

Contact: Local to Global has two interrelated components – the first focuses on works by artists like Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, Frederick Hammersley and Susan York who have lived and worked in the region, as well as artists and artworks with differing connections to New Mexico.

A second component of more contemporary artworks directly address issues of land, location and environment includes site specific installation Pollination by indigenous collaborative Post-commodity, single channel videos The Placeless Place by Berlin and New York based artists Ati Maier, and Yorgo Alexopoulos’s work Everything In-Between. Alexopoulos’ work, a 4K animation with custom electronics, was shot and commissioned in New Mexico underscoring the continued relevance of the centuries-old tradition of artists making work that is a meditation on the New Mexico landscape.

About the New Mexico Museum of Art: http://www.nmartmuseum.org/ -- Founded in 1917 as the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, the New Mexico Museum of Art has been presenting innovative arts programming in downtown Santa Fe for a century. At its founding, the museum collected and exhibited artworks by noted artists from New Mexico and elsewhere. This tradition continues today with a wide array of exhibitions and a significant collection featuring work from the world’s leading artists. Today, as at its founding, the Museum of Art strives to bring the art of New Mexico to the world and the art of the world to New Mexico. Museum exhibitions and programs are supported by donors to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and its Director’s Leadership Fund, Exhibitions Development Fund, and Fund for Museum Education. A division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Hours: 10 am to 5 pm daily, May through October; closed Mondays November through April, closed Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. 107 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, just off the downtown Plaza in Santa Fe, NM 87501. 24 Hr. Recorded Message: (505) 476-5072; Front desk: (505) 476-5041. Hours: 10 am to 5 pm daily, May through October; closed Mondays November through April, closed Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Events, news releases and images about activities at the History Museum and Palace of the Governors and other in divisions of the Department of Cultural Affairs can be accessed at media.newmexicoculture.org.